Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
~ Henry David Thoreau

The “song still in them.” All of my life this quote has resonated with me, and yet I find it most curious. What does it mean to “go to the grave with the song still in them?” Does it mean that they died unfulfilled? Or that they never understood their reason for being, searching for the elusive answer to “why am I here?” Does it mean that they had not accomplished their dreams, or that somehow they had failed?

I, like most people, grew up with the adults around me asking, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” How is a child suppose to answer that? Is the answer found somewhere in the role playing we do as children? Is it found by becoming enamored of someone we see on television, hear on the radio, or see in a magazine? Or do our parents plant the seeds that form our ideas of what we should become in life? Or perhaps our teachers? As adults we hear ‘teachers’ and ‘personalities’ of all kinds telling us that we should be living our “authentic lives.” Who decides what our authentic life is? What is it suppose to look like?
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